‘An amazing ride’: Dr Bryon Pirola shares insights on family, faith and professional life

‘You’re only limited by what you actually choose to do and learn to do,’ Dr Byron Pirola told his audience at the latest Melbourne Catholic Professionals (MCP) luncheon as he reflected on his rich experience in professional life and the Church.

As 215 people enjoyed a convivial lunch at the RACV Club in Melbourne’s CBD on Thursday 14 August, guest speaker Dr Pirola—widely recognised as one of Australia’s most influential strategy consultants—shared insights on everything from youth ministry, marriage preparation, prayer and discernment to biochemistry, strategy consulting and the profound challenges and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence (AI).

Born in 1965, Dr Pirola was the eldest of four children in a family he says was ‘deeply involved with the Church’ but ‘not particularly pious’. His father’s medical career took the young family to London and New York, and when they returned to Sydney in 1973, his parents brought Marriage Encounter, a popular marriage-enrichment program, with them from the United States, introducing what would become ‘quite a phenomenal lay movement’ in Australia throughout the 1970s and 80s. In his early teens, he said, his family home became ‘ a hotel, a national office, a restaurant … and a meeting centre’, as his parents welcomed guests from around the country and overseas, including Marriage Encounter’s American founder Fr Chuck Gallagher.

I do find myself playing an initiator role in my life.

This early experience gave him, he said, ‘tremendous insight into what lay leadership could actually do in the Church’. By 18, he had founded a parish youth group and been appointed to the Sydney Diocese’s youth ministry, where, at the age of 19—in what he described as a ‘pivotal, sliding-doors moment’—he found himself in a discussion about how to launch a new youth program in the diocese. Fr Gallagher, who was part of the conversation, asked the assembled adults, ‘Why don’t you get Byron to do it?’ They were dubious at first, but Dr Pirola remembers thinking, ‘Well hang on, why not?’ With the support of the group, he took up the challenge.

Two years later, after a trip back to the United States with his family, he helped introduce the Antioch youth movement to Australia. ‘At its time in Australia, it was the most exciting youth movement in the country’ he explained, with one in five parishes hosting an Antioch community.

‘None of that was done by me alone—or anything I’ve done, frankly,’ he said. ‘But I do find myself playing an initiator role in my life, partly through that formation.’

Meanwhile, Dr Pirola was studying science at university and discovering his passion for biochemistry and organic chemistry. A first-class honours degree led to a PhD in protein chemistry at the Commonwealth Centre for Gene Technology at the University of Adelaide, where he found himself involved in ‘fast-paced, cutting-edge science’, while also serving as a senior tutor at the Catholic residential college and remaining ‘heavily involved’ with Antioch.

What I’ve learnt—in my father’s great wisdom—was if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.

His life in those years ‘was exhilarating but exhausting,’ he said. ‘Like everything I’ve done in my career, I’ve chosen always to throw myself 100 per cent against it. And what I’ve learnt—in my father’s great wisdom—was if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.’

After briefly considering the priesthood, Dr Pirola instead discerned a vocation in marriage, dating and marrying Francine, his ‘beautiful … and very patient wife’.

 On finishing his PhD, he realised that he was ‘as interested in the business of science as the science of science’ and, with ‘no great plan and a lot of luck and good fortune’, found himself working for McKinsey & Company. When he was first interviewed for the job, he knew little about what strategy advisors do—‘you couldn’t google anything in those days’—but he walked out of the interview thinking, ‘My God, you can pay me to do this for a living? How cool is that?’

As a fledgling advisor, he was ‘thrown into these wild problems’. He loved it, describing it as ‘a great five or six years of my life’. He and Francine lived in London and then New York, where they also worked with Fr Chuck Gallagher and another ‘fantastic couple’, Ron and Kathy Feher, on a new marriage program, which they brought back to Australia, launching it here on their return.

It was servant leadership. It was never about us ... We were there to make a leader successful by achieving something others told them was impossible.

By this time, they were expecting their first child, and four more would arrive in the following years. It was a time, he said, of ‘long days and long nights’ as the young couple cared for small children and launched the marriage course, giving marriage courses to ‘elderly couples and people with many more years of experience [than] us’. They also ran the Australian Council of Natural Family Planning for four years.

‘Our home office in our little terrace in Sydney had a desk on one side of the room, where Francine had her computer, and mine on the other, and we’d sit there with our backs to each other, talking at each other while we’d be writing talks, planning things, organising stuff most evenings when the kids were in bed.’

Back in Australia, Dr Pirola was approached to join Port Jackson Partners, where, he said, his ‘real professional life was developed and built’. Founded by former McKinsey partners Terrey Arcus and Fred Hilmer, the partnership had a ‘very simple aspiration’: ‘to be the best advisors on the most important matters to the leaders of our most important institutions’.

‘It was servant leadership,’ he explained. ‘It was never about us. We shunned the media. We served our clients. We were there to make a leader successful by achieving something others told them was impossible.’

Behind every successful man, there’s a woman with a surprised look on her face. But in my case, behind that successful woman, there is a husband with a proud smile on his face.

The emphasis was on enabling rather than driving their clients. ‘We were commercial,’ he said, ‘but we never ran it as a business,’ and advisors were given the space and opportunity to pursue personal interests outside of their work.

This flexibility allowed the Pirolas to continue their work for the Church, building ‘genuine experience’ in marriage and family ministry. His wife, he said, is ‘the brains trust’ of this work. ‘Anyone who knows her knows that I married up … Behind every successful man, there’s a woman with a surprised look on her face. But in my case, behind that successful woman, there is a husband with a proud smile on his face.’

As enthusiastic early adopters of new technology, the Pirolas were the first in the world to launch a fully online marriage-preparation platform, transforming ‘the way we formed and evangelised couples’. The platform now operates in almost every English-speaking country and is now available in other languages, being used to prepare more than half the couples married in the Catholic Church each year.

Looking back, Dr Pirola describes his professional life as ‘an amazing ride’—one that has brought ‘enormous satisfaction’. With the recent sale of Port Jackson Partners to EY (formerly Ernst Young), he continues to welcome new challenges. ‘At 65, I can honestly say I learned more last year about my professional life and how to do it than I did when I was starting out at 26,’ he said.

I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed anything as exciting, and potentially devastating, [as AI] in my professional career.

Perhaps the most significant of these new challenges is posed by AI. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed anything as exciting, and potentially devastating, … in my professional career.’ As it was for the internet, ‘the impact will be profound,’ he says.

Noting the steepness of AI’s uptake, he observed that ‘it’s been coming for 50 years, but it’s gone almost vertical. That’s very rare to see something go so quickly.’ We also ‘don’t know where it stops. We’ve talked to the leading scientists in Anthropic and some of the AI firms, and they do not know where this thing caps out.’

He is also struck by AI’s ‘ubiquitous application’, noting ‘there are very few technologies that come in that can touch so much of what we do. This is very broad-reaching.’ And it has been ‘dropped into a very mature ecosystem’. He pointed out that while the electric light bulb had to wait for electrification, AI is ‘dropping right in the middle of data lakes, 100 per cent real-time connectivity, deep, fast processing capability’.

My primary mission and goal … is to love Francine, my wife, ... such that when she encounters God on her death, her best human experience of God’s unconditional love will be mine.

While acknowledging that AI is ‘not true intelligence, and it’s unlikely to be’, he predicted that it will nevertheless cut through low-value, white-collar work ‘like a hot knife through butter, and that’s going to be culture-changing.’ It will also be ‘a material gift of productivity to others’, he said, spawning ‘industries and businesses that we’ve never thought of’.

Despite the enjoyment he gains from his work and from tackling thorny challenges like AI, Dr Pirola’s real purpose and identity come from somewhere else. His job, he said, ‘doesn’t define who I am’.

Instead, he said, he is defined by two fundamental dimensions: ‘I’m a child of God who is loved unconditionally, as unworthy as I am of that love.’ Second, ‘I have chosen to spend my adult life in the vocation of Catholic marriage—a life where my primary mission and goal … is to love Francine, my wife, as best as humanly possible, and as inadequately as that will be, such that when she encounters God on her death, her best human experience of God’s unconditional love will be mine.’

Everything I do, I try to … consider it in the context of what is the right good, not what is my good that comes from this.

Dr Pirola said that every profession, however satisfying or enriching, comes with a cost, ‘because the one finite resource … we all have is time. You can’t make it, and you can’t take it back … As Catholic professionals, we are called to live a deliberate life [in] how we deploy our time.’

A life without regrets, he pointed out, is not a life without trade-offs. ‘It’s all about the trade-offs,’ he said. ‘Everything I do, I try to … consider it in the context of what is the right good, not what is my good that comes from this. You can’t do that without having your priorities ordered. You need good advisors, and you need God.’

For Dr Pirola, a prayer life is central to this, ‘and that prayer life needs to evolve.’ While he doesn’t consider himself particularly pious, he is grateful to have discovered, at a difficult time in his life, ‘the meditative and reflective nature of the Rosary and Mary, [which] stays with me to this day’.

He also finds St Augustine’s advice to ‘love God and do what you want’ to be profoundly insightful. ‘You align your heart with God’s desire for you and you can freely follow your desires. And that’s the discernment trick in prayer. The other part of prayer is to be bold,’ he says, noting that he’s learnt to become quite ‘transactional’ with God ‘but I hope in a very good way’.

Our secular culture wants us to take our faith out of the public square and make it a private matter, but by its very nature, our faith takes us into the public square.

Ultimately, Dr Pirola said, he is a ‘Catholic professional’ and not a ‘professional who happens to be Catholic’, insisting that the distinction is important.

‘Our secular culture wants us to take our faith out of the public square and make it a private matter,’ he observed, ‘but by its very nature, our faith takes us into the public square. The fruit of our faith must have an expression in building the kingdom of God.’

Dr Pirola has clearly built a successful career, and a rich faith and family life, on that very principle.